The Red Army had many reasons to seek revenge when it finally reached the borders of the Reich in January 1945. The leaders had spread in Russia, in every detail, the barbarities of the Wehrmacht and the SS. The result was the most terrifying massacre in history, with tanks crushing columns of refugees under their treads, mass rapes, looting, and destruction. Thousands of women and children died from the cold or were slaughtered because the leaders of the Nazi Party, refusing to accept defeat, had forbidden the evacuation of civilians. More than seven million people fled to the West, fearing the reprisals of the Red Army.
However, not everyone had the same fate. Some suffered annihilation, while others were saved by a miracle. Soviet soldiers treated German women and children with the greatest generosity, but also with the greatest cruelty. This moral chaos was the result of a titanic struggle between two tyrants who cared nothing for the lives of their followers. The Nazis sent fourteen-year-old boys on bicycles against Soviet tanks on suicide missions, while, as the Red Army encircled Berlin, SS units combed the city and executed or hanged every man who was not in his place.
Hitler, half-mad in his bunker, consumed by his monstrous ambition, issued bestial orders, wanting to destroy the capital of the Reich, experiencing his personal "Twilight". Stalin, on the other hand, was prepared to sacrifice as many lives as necessary to capture Berlin before the Americans. New documents from the Russian archives prove for the first time that the Soviet leader had an extremely powerful motive.
Antony Beevor, using new material from the former Soviet archives, as well as from the corresponding American, British, French, and Swedish archives, has recreated the experiences of all those trapped in the nightmare of the final collapse of the Third Reich. "The Fall of Berlin 1945" is a horrific story of pride, stupidity, fanaticism, revenge, and brutality, but also of astonishing endurance, self-sacrifice, and survival under adverse conditions.